There was a report on the BBC Breakfast programme today about the threat of rising sea levels to historic castles on our coast. The BBC bleated that these castles, which had protected Britain’s coasts for hundreds of years, were now being destroyed by rising sea levels due to climate change. The BBC claimed that “scientists have predicted that sea levels could rise by a metre by the end of this century”.
This reminded me of a BBC documentary, Earth Under Water made by the BBC in 2010. In this documentary the BBC presented two scenarios – a two metre sea-level rise by 2100 and a five metre sea-level rise by 2200. Using these two ‘scenarios’, the BBC showed the terrifying consequences for coastal cities and low-lying land from these predicted sea-level rises.
I guess the one positive one can take from the two programmes is that the BBC has reduced its prediction of sea-level rise by 2100 from two metres to a mere one metre.
But let’s test whether a sea-level rise of two metres or even one metre by 2100 is credible.
Here’s a table of sea-level rises from 1880 to 1980.
Notice at least two things:
- The sea-level is rising somewhere between 10cm and 12cm per hundred years. We have just 78 years till the year 2100. Yet at the current rate, it would take about 1,000 years for the sea level to rise by one metre and around 2,000 years for the sea level to rise by two metres. So the idea that the sea level could rise by one metre (or even two metres) in the next 78 years is complete nonsense.
- The sea level is rising by different rates at different locations and is even apparently falling by 37cm per century around Scandinavia.
It’s a pity that nobody at the BBC has read my book There is No Climate Crisis. If they had, they would know what’s really happening and stop making their wildly exaggerated, nonsensical claims of impending climate catastrophe. Here’s just a small excerpt from my book about supposed rising sea levels:
The changes, or more accurately apparent changes, in sea levels are also partly due to factors like Tectonic Plate Movement, Glacial Isostatic Adjustment, Post-Glacial Rebound and subsidence due to water abstraction around major cities. Tectonic Plate Movement is, of course, the continual movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, which give us earthquakes and tsunamis. Glacial Isostatic Adjustment has been going on for at least two million years. Massive glaciers grow and then melt, alternately depressing the Earth’s crust and then releasing it again. As we are now in an interglacial, which has led to melting ice, Scandinavia is slowly rising. Hence, the sea level at Stockholm appears to be falling.
The Post-Glacial Rebound, which is causing much of the East Coast of North America to sink, occurs because large areas of Canada and America were weighed down by massive ice sheets in the last Ice Age. When that ice melted between 26,500 and 7,000 years ago, land in the centre of the North American began to rise while land around the periphery sank in what has been described as a “sort of sea-saw effect”. Hence sea levels at the East Coast of America seem to be rising faster than in many other areas of the world. Meanwhile in California on the U.S. West Coast, around 8 million of the state’s 40 million inhabitants are believed to live in areas where the land is subsiding probably partly due to Tectonic Movements and partly due to subsidence caused by increased water abstraction.
Looking at the table above one of the largest apparent sea level increases has been 30cm in 100 years at the East Coast of North America where the land has been sinking due to Post-Glacial Rebound. The sea level for Scandinavia has apparently ‘dropped’ by 37cm in 100 years as the land has risen due to Glacial Isostatic rebound. A National Land Survey of Finland study completed in early 2021 calculated that the South Coast of Sweden was rising by at least 1mm a year, further north the uplift was 2mm to 3mm a year and in central Finland the land uplift might be as much as 8mm to 9mm a year.
Jakarta is thought to be subsiding by 25 cm a year largely because of groundwater extraction. Houston is sinking as the oil wells beneath it are depleted. Bangkok’s and Shanghai’s skyscrapers are weighing the two cities down. London is slowly sinking partly due to water abstraction and partly due to Post-Glacial Rebound which is causing Scotland to slowly rise, like Sweden and Finland, after having been weighed down by glaciers during the last ice age.
A report by scientists in 2019 suggested that the real sea level rise due purely to thermal expansion caused by global warming was just 0.7mm a year: “Sea level rise by thermal expansion is likely less than 0.7mm/year… Subsidence is the main contributor of sea level rise in many areas of the world.”
Here, to finish, is a simple chart comparing rising sea levels with rising levels of atmospheric CO2, where the lack of relationship between the two is clear.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon. This article was first published on his blog.
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So according to environmentalists it would seem that coastal erosion didn’t exist until atmospheric CO2 reached a certain level. That would have come as a surprise to the former inhabitants of Dunwich (now somewhere off the Suffolk coast).
A little further north the BBC used Happisburgh as an example of sea level rise a few monthes ago .Again very soft cliffs and the odd storm take large chunks out of East Anglia every winter.Been going on for centuries .No link to CO2 ever ..More BBC bollocks !!
Those submerged Welsh counties in Cardigan Bay…
They do not teach basic arithmetic in politics, journalism and sociology courses just as the amount of economics on a PPE is small and only Keynsian.
Ah. I had wondered how all those PPE MPs could come out with such rubbish. I know economics has been called the dismal science, but that’s ridiculous.
Isn’t the other key missing piece “Which coastal castles are affected”. I don’t know all the castles in the UK but are any actually by the side of the sea ie within 1 metre of current sea level- if anyone knows….
Caernarfon
https://cadw.gov.wales/visit/places-to-visit/caernarfon-castle
I have paddled past Caernarfon Castle in a sea kayak, splendid site but it appeared quite safe and sound and under no great threat from the sea.
Hundreds of years old too. Like those irrigation channels to make gardens in the desert. Better uses of money than inevitably futile attempts to engineer a more profitable climate (which in reality are attempts to produce a greater role for the United Nations).
I have read David Craig’s book and highly recommend it. From my own observations (and I am sure many others make similar observations) the amount of sea rise level where I live is negligible. For 30 years I have been watching the tides in the Severn Estuary, and there has been no change in the height of the highest tides, which one would expect if alarmist predictions were correct. As is usual, some years the tides are good (exciting and high) some years indifferent – important if you are one of these hardy souls who likes surfing the Severn Bore!
Exactly.
Currently in Campania, Italy, specifically the towns of Amalfi, Atrani, Praiano, Positano. Sea levels are obviously quite unchanged for at least hundreds of years.
I seem to remember a report about subduction in (I think) Tuvalu leading to a perception of sea level rise. Anyhow, I have long felt that putting money into flood defences, irrigation and reversing desertification would be a better use of resources than any net zero carbon nonsense and related rubbish such as importing American wood to Drax instead of using locally available coal.
The BBC is a left-wing political campaign organisation pretending to be a broadcaster.
Always have been apparently. I know they were taking a partisan view on issues back in the 1960s.
Which is exactly why they shouldn’t be funded by a tax on TV users.
Not sure it’s even so much the left they pander to any more. They’re as much stooges for the establishment as they’ve always been, which is neither right nor left but entirely self-serving.
In this respect, nothing much has changed bar the fact this establishment enjoy total control of and protection from the media, who also act in feedback to enhance the reality distortion field in which they exist. Free of scrutiny, it is entirely lacking in honesty or integrity.
Towards the end of the UK’s summer of 1976, BBC2’s Horizon – a reasonably serious science-based series – caved in to the lunatic doom-monger fringe and broadcast a silly episode warning us of an imminent threat of the UK turning to desert. I sensed then that a milestone had been reached and soon lost interest in watching what had turned into a junk entertainment programme. Even the recent summer, 46 years later, was a mere shadow of the 100 day Mediterranean one of 76.
I remember the late, great Christopher Booker reporting on how Owen Paterson MP endeavoured to find the real causes of the flooding on the Somerset levels some years back and took effective action to do something about it. It seems they came for him alright. I rather suspect that the BBC (who have decided that it’s alright for them to be biased on the climate scare) told a different story to Mr. Booker.
Can we stop confusing coastal erosion with inundation.
Gravity sort of ensures that a dense liquid like water maintains the same relative level around the planet (or across the flatness if you are a Green). Unless the same relative rise is noted around the world, local variations are obviously due to the land moving, not the water.
President Obama on crisis of rising sea levels. 2013
https://twitter.com/barackobama/status/362595604385370113?lang=en
President Obama purchases multi million dollar Martha’s Vinyard island home 2021
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/a30169311/barack-michelle-obama-buy-marthas-vineyard-house/